Indie Books as Collectible Literature?

With more and more self-published authors getting “discovered” by the traditional publishing industry and in many cases having their originally self-published books redistributed by a major publishing house, what becomes of those few original copies that readers came to love from the very beginning?

While many of those books never saw ink or paper, having originally grown in popularity and gained a solid reader fan base as ebooks, Amy Edelman, president of Indie Reader, indicated that many of these original print editions from before the book caught the eyes of the publishers can still be had…for a price.

“I’ve always been interested in collecting old books and first editions and it suddenly dawned on me that all these indie books that are being signed by traditional publishers (the ones available in paper form) are the actual first editions of the books,” explained Edelman to GoodeReader. “I mean, how cool to be able to say that you read Sylvia Day’s Bared to You or Jamie McGuire’s Beautiful Disaster in its original form? Plus, many times the traditional publishers change the covers and make edits. But I think it’s interesting to be able to see how the traditional publishers think they can make a book—in many cases one that’s already sold hundreds of thousands of copies—better than what the author envisioned.”

In a post today on the Indie Reader website, Edelman cited several self-published books that have gone on to greater attention through traditional publishing, including the staggering prices that several of those books’ original prints now garner. Some of the titles were self-published in print using Amazon’s CreateSpace service, and the prices for those books reach between $35 and $130, with one extremely rare title, Love Unrehearsed by Tina Reber, going for nearly $1,000 by a third-party vendor.